Photo stills - raw jpeg or VCD slideshow?

26th May 2003 17:18 #1

Member

I'm just about to get a standalone DVD player and I see a number now have the ability to view jpeg photos directly from CDR. Now I know you can create a VCD slideshow so its not essential to have this feature, I just wondered what the pros and cons are of these two methods. Am I right in thinking that in both cases the resolution will be limited by the resolution of the TV set, not the format? I'll be mostly wanting to display pictures derived from hi-res (2700dpi) scans of 35mm slides, and looking for best image quality and simple production without any frills (i.e. not bothered about fancy transitions etc).

Quote

27th May 2003 03:49 #2

vitualis

Member

Originally Posted by Aaandy

I'm just about to get a standalone DVD player and I see a number now have the ability to view jpeg photos directly from CDR. Now I know you can create a VCD slideshow so its not essential to have this feature, I just wondered what the pros and cons are of these two methods. Am I right in thinking that in both cases the resolution will be limited by the resolution of the TV set, not the format? I'll be mostly wanting to display pictures derived from hi-res (2700dpi) scans of 35mm slides, and looking for best image quality and simple production without any frills (i.e. not bothered about fancy transitions etc).

Pros of JPEG on a CD -- well, it's JPEG on a CD... Simple and easy.

Cons: they don't play on many DVD players. Furthermore, high resolution stills often take a LONG time to display on DVD players as they have to resize the still...

Pros of MPEG Stills on a CD -- plays on essentially all DVD and VCD players. Excellent quality (near max. resolution available on TV). Also, you can make additional functionality like menus.

Disadvantages is that MPEG Stills aren't an "editable" format in that you can't readily load them up, resize and print them. If you put in the original images as well, you waste part of the CD space in duplication. Furthermore, many CD drives can read Mode2 CDs at 4x so reading large images from a VCD can be slow.

And yes, the resolution will be limited ultimately to the resolution of your TV. In general, this is probably approximately 720x480/576 pixels (not including overscan of course).

Regards.